


a thousand years

by bluebeholder



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Light Angst, M/M, Reincarnation, The Outsider Narrates, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 05:41:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15988805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: Every thousand years, a man is born, and every thousand years, the Outsider meets him once again.Reincarnation is a funny thing, when you're a god who never dies.





	a thousand years

**Author's Note:**

  * For [adrift_me](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adrift_me/gifts).



> Thank my girlfriend adrift_me for making me change the ending. I was going to have it be tragic. She convinced me otherwise.

This is not the first time we met.

It will not be the last.

They will reckon it as the year 798 in later chronicles, if indeed they reckon the year at all. On the site of what will someday be the capital of a empire that spans the Isles, a civilization is breathing its last gasps. But this is not a place of intrigue, not for me. 

He is born to seal-hunters on the ice of Tyvia. He grows strong and swift and sure-footed and fearless, clever if perhaps a little dense sometimes. I recognize him, surely as I remember the Pandyssian born a thousand years before. They name him Amaruq, the grey wolf, and I remember other names. I look forward and see another.

But this one is here and now, and I watch him with great interest. It is when he is merely eighteen that he wrestles a wolf, breaking its neck, and truly earning his name. That day he becomes a man, that day he becomes adored, known, loved.

And it is that night I visit him.

He knows me as the god of whales, as I always will be, but also the god of seals. Seal-eyes, he calls my eyes, is shocked by my white-as-snow skin. I am utterly alien to him. But he is fearless, fearless as he will always be and always has been. I cannot help myself.

My Mark blazes on his hand. It will permit him to breathe beneath the waters, to summon shoals of fish to do his bidding, to take the shape of a seabird and fly over the ice. He accepts the gift with reverence. These people fear me, but adore me. They will be forgotten many years hence, mixed with those who will be called Tyvian in later times, and I regret that.

But here and now Amaruq belongs to me. The Mark makes him sacred, holy, and his path is irrevocably altered. He is groomed for power, leadership, magic. Nights he spends in contemplation, alone, for he will never know a mortal lover. It is unheard-of for one like him to know a divine lover, but I have never been able to resist him. I never will.

In his fortieth year, the ice begins to melt. The glaciers and ice-sheets crack, and the waters slowly rise. Fear courses among the people, and Amaruq stands still among them. It is he who gathers the people, who leads them to the Isles. By his words, they are saved.

They found villages on the shores of Tyvia. It is cold—will always be cold—but this is a new place, one to which they must adapt. There are trees, plants such as they have never seen. It is a time of innovation and I enjoy nothing more than watching it happen.

Amaruq is nearly sixty when another people, from the south, meets them at last. There is a misunderstanding, a mistake. Honest and genuine, no intent to offend.

As such things always go, the misunderstanding ends in blood.

I watch from the Void as Amaruq is the first victim of what will become a war.

Though his soul fades into the Void, I do not mourn. No, he was only the next incarnation. He was one face among many.

So, as I did before his feet ever touched the ice, I wait.

I wait a thousand years, until a baby is born in Serkonos. His first cry shakes the Void and I know that this child is indeed the one. I stand invisible by his mother’s bedside and listen to her name him.

“Corvo.”

Yes, this is the one.

Just as I did before, I watch and listen and wait. He is eighteen again when he performs a remarkable feat of arms—oh, how cyclic history can be!—but I do not mark him now. In this present time my symbol is not holy but heretical. Though there is great change on his horizon, I stay my hand, and wait.

He is lover to an Empress, father to the heir to the throne. I think of the pain he will endure and shudder. The death of the Empress will be indifferent to me, but I will see his hands stained with his lover’s blood and watch hope drain from his eyes as his daughter is ripped from him. And that, that fills me with something like regret.

I wait, though, because perhaps he will never achieve his potential. Yet Corvo survives his ordeal in prison and emerges into the light of freedom. He is haggard, body scarred and bruised, rendered completely mute by the trauma, unable to shape words.

This is the man I call into the Void.

I give him my Mark, as I have always done and always will do. I give him the heart of his dead lover, a small comfort, and he is grateful. He does not bend a knee to me, but I see the gratitude there. It is no love, not yet, but I am prepared to wait. After a thousand years, what is only a little more time?

He seeks my shrines with the same zeal he uses against his enemies. He kneels to me, he caresses the runes I give him with reverent hands. When I do not appear directly he rests in the secret rooms where shrines are hidden, sleeps, bandages his wounds, cleans his weapons. I cannot help but notice the only sound sleep he has occurs in these secret sacred places.

I like to think it is my presence, and not the secrecy, which gives him comfort.

But all things come to an end, and I grant him a farewell. I distance myself. I turn my attention to my others, my other toys, and wait. There is more to come for my Corvo, but for now he does not require any of me. I yearn, a bit, want to see the look in his eyes when I finally stand before him as if I am a man, but I do not give in.

After a thousand years, what is only a little more time?

Ah, Delilah. My least favorite, always, given a Mark for potential which she turned against me. She seals my Corvo in stone, rips my gift away from him. I am not shocked, but I am unsettled. And because it is right, I give my gifts to Corvo’s daughter Emily, just as exceptional.

There was a time when this might have been Corvo, who fought Delilah, but that course of events is closed off. Sealed. Emily is my champion now. I look after her, give her runes and timepieces and the heart of her very mother, and never admit to myself that I do it for the affections of a man who in this time has not loved me.

After it all ends, I turn my attention away. Meagan Foster is of far greater interest than the beginning reign of Emily the Wise, because what that woman will do is something I have awaited for thousands of years. She wishes to kill me. I wish her to kill me.

Before I can regret that I will never see my Corvo again, I hear his voice in the Void.

Hope is a strange feeling, but it fills my heart all the same. I return to Dunwall Tower, to a secret room where a small, private shrine has been raised. A secret between father and daughter, then, heretics beholden to the same god.

Corvo is waiting for me.

“You saved her,” he says, looking up at me as I manifest over the shrine.

“No preamble?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.

“You gave her your Mark. She told me about all of it—all your help. You saved my daughter.” I see in his eyes the same gratitude I saw years before, and feel the space in my chest where my heart would be ache a little.

Gratitude is not love.

And I do not have a thousand more years to wait anymore.

My boots touch the ground and I will them to make a sound, to make them seem real. In the space of a breath, I have Corvo by the lapels of his jacket, dragging him into a kiss. I am shorter than he is by a few inches, but I do not care. He makes a sound of shock and I think if I were mortal I would be fighting tears.

After millennia, it’s strange that his kiss is exactly the same.

I expect him to shove me away. To demand explanations. But he does not; instead, I feel his arms carefully wrap around me, as if I am fragile. As if I am not a god. Corvo asks no questions of me, simply accepting that this is how things are now.

When I ask, “Is this what you wanted?” as he strips me of my jacket, he only smiles, and inclines his head in affirmation.

I stop him. “How long?”

“I don’t know,” Corvo says bluntly. “I never thought you would be interested.”

“Corvo…” I hold his face between my hands. “…you _fascinate_ me.”

I could slap myself for being so stupid as to have waited for so long. I will only have this night, and no more, when I could have had decades. Corvo’s body is different than it has been in the past—I remember the nameless Pandyssian was thin and wiry, Amaruq was short, the man before them both had been thought a woman at birth—but I love it, all the same. The touch is familiar, the kiss is familiar, the eyes are exactly the same as they have always been.

Meagan Foster does not kill me.

No, she frees me from the Void. She makes me mortal, puts my feet on the ground for good. It is now that I discover that to have a mortal heart is agonizingly painful. It beats and I count each one, and I will never take a single painful beat for granted.

The human heart hurts most of all when it is filled with hope, as mine is now. My eyes are green, clear, and I see the world better. The memories of my former lovers fade from my mind and it is only Corvo left, and it is for his sake I beg Meagan to take me to Dunwall.

He welcomes me with open arms, and I learn what it’s like to be happy. To love someone for who they are, not who they were, or yet might be. We are together, and that is rest enough for two tired souls like ours. He sleeps better with me—I learn what it’s like to sleep at all. We stumble through new lives together and it is the greatest gift I have ever been given.

I am mortal now, and in becoming mortal, I am caught in the cycle of the Void. Someday, years hence, I will be reborn, but no longer will I know of him. I will forget, as all souls do.

My comfort is this.

I have seen millions of souls die and be reborn, and history is more cyclic than the natural philosophers will ever know. Someday, ages and ages hence, a thousand years from now, Corvo and I will be reborn. We will have different faces, different names, and no memories of the men we once were.

And yet we will find each other, all the same.

There’s no happy ending to this story, for nothing ever ends.

But it is safe to say that Corvo and I will, as the fairy tale tells us, live happily ever after.


End file.
